[IAEP] [support-gang] [UKids] XO Veterans/Remembrance Day..is our Legacy on FIRE?

[Anish Mangal]

It is interesting to follow this discussion. I think it was in .uy where
they said that while the laptops cost $200, TCO was ~$600, i.e. a bulk of
the money was spent on infrastructure, teacher training, community, repairs
etc. - so if you plan to do this *properly* then the upfront cost of the
tablet is not *that* big of a factor, considering other expenses involved.
However, it is very enticing to someone just starting out with new
deployment to think in terms of upfront hardware costs - hence this thread.

I am personally against promoting tablets for education, but that matters
little when a school administrator or teacher asks for them - you just make
your case but do as they say :-)

Lastly, I see huge value in used laptops. A thinkpad (T400) machine with
250GB HDD, 2GB RAM, a dual core processor and a 14 inch screen is available
for <$130. I recently set up a small number of them running Linux Mint
(because it is very cough-window-cough like) and a full offline mirror of
ubuntu and mint repositories - which provides some ~80,000 software
packages. These laptops are also easily repairable, and hence help promote
repair culture.

Cheers,
Anish



On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 3:12 AM, Alan Claver <alc at psu.edu> wrote:

>
> > On Nov 11, 2015, at 3:07 PM, Braddock Gaskill <braddock at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I would be very weary of relying on the root'ing of an Amazon Tablet.
> They have been rootable in the past, then automatic upgrades break the
> rootability, then someone figures out a clever hack, and then it is
> defeated again by Amazon.  You are not going to know month-to-month if you
> can buy more to deploy.
>
> Does a “hardened” device still have value in the communities we service. I
> think that’s an important question that needs discussion. No consumer
> device is going to meet the definition of hardened (or repairable).
> _______________________________________________
> support-gang mailing list
> support-gang at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang
>
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